Summer Ruins (25 page)

“We can’t run forever,” she continues. “And obviously we can’t hide, either. We need to spend the next month figuring out how to attack them, and once we do, I know where to wage that battle. We need to go to Dallas.”

“What’s Dallas?” I ask, realizing too late that it must be another city and that I’m the only one who’s never heard of it.

Lucas squeezes my hand. “That’s where they hold the Summer Celebration.”

Chapter 24.

“Wait.” It frustrates me, being behind, and I need to catch up. “They don’t hold the Summer Celebration in a Sanctioned City?”

Pax shakes his head. “No, it’s always in Dallas. I don’t know why.”

“It’s supposed to be exciting, to reinforce that it’s a nice thing the Others do for us once a year,” Deshi grinds out, his jaw clenched.

“It’s genius,” Lucas tells Brittany. “All the Others will be there, except maybe the ones at the Harvest Site. And the humans will be in one place for unveiling.”

“Everyone will be in one place if things go badly, too,” I remind them. It’s smart, and going on the offensive is unexpected, but putting everyone on Earth in the middle of this fight thrums anxiety through my heart.

Lucas holds my gaze in his as gently as his hands have ever touched me. “Things are going to go badly regardless. And what’s the difference if we die fighting or die when the Others leave? We’re all in the middle, and there’s nowhere else to go.”

“I agree with Lucas,” Leah interjects.

When I look up, the rest of the kids are nodding, their faces set with grim determination.

“We need a plan, though. We can’t be caught unaware again. This time we do the surprising.” It’s Laura now, and after a moment, everyone is murmuring ideas back and forth.

Pax whistles again, bringing silence back to the graveyard. “Yes, good. But we still need to leave. Now.”

“Wait,” I say quietly. “One more thing.”

I rummage in one of the bags until I find a notebook and a pen.

“What are you doing?” a tall thin boy with a crop of long curls asks. The seriousness in his face doesn’t seem at home there, as though he’d rather be laughing.

“What’s your name?”

“Christian. What are you doing?” he asks again.

I take a deep breath, willing my voice to stay steady. “A bunch of our friends died today. This is a cemetery. We should… they need to be laid to rest before we leave. We may never be back here.”

“What do you mean, ‘laid to rest’?” Jordan presses.

“I’m going to write down everyone’s names. There should be twenty-six. We can remember them all, together.” I pause, swallowing hard. “I’ll start. My friends Monica and Val, from Portland.”

I try to write down their names but my fingers shake too hard. Lucas takes the pen from me, his cool hand covering mine for a brief second before he starts writing. Everyone calls out names and he scribes them until there are twenty-six. Twenty-six people dead, because they helped us. Or tried to.

The names melt into the air, diffusing onto the breeze. It’s almost as though they belong to this graveyard now, too, as much a part of the air and earth as Wild Bill and all the rest.

Brittany returns to my side; I hadn’t even noticed she’d left. She hands me a heavy rock—smooth gray mottled with white and black flecks—and gives me a rueful smile. “Leave the list under it so the paper won’t blow away.”

Tears fill my eyes, and as I find enough bravery to search the faces of those who are left, their grief meets my gaze. There is also determination, though, and anger. We will say good-bye, and then we will leave the dead here and move on with the living.

I set the list of names down on Calamity Jane’s headstone, the heavy rock trapping the paper against the sun-faded surface. A warm breeze ruffles the edges, kissing my cheeks with warmth, giving the impression that someone or something unseen offers comfort. It makes me smile, and for a few moments all of us enjoy the quiet afternoon.

“The sun is setting, which means we need to keep it on our right to go south. Let’s get started.” Brittany starts walking, and as it’s always been, more follow her.

Pax, Lucas, and Deshi take three of the duffel bags, and three boys stop to take the rest. One is Phil, the other two—a blond and a brunet—remain nameless as they shoulder the heavy bags and fall in line.

The four of us stay in the rear, partly because it’s the best position to defend from if the Wardens show up, and partly so we can talk. Wolf pads at my side, leaving every once in a while to nose Pax’s or Lucas’s hands. He’s even checked on Deshi a couple of times, reinforcing my belief that we can trust him. Leah and Brittany walk toward the front, heads bent together. They look as though they’re catching up, probably swapping stories about everything that’s happened to them since they were separated last spring.

“We need to take some precautions. Althea, you and I are the best at navigating the Wilds, so I think we should be the ones to do it.” Pax doesn’t stop walking or look my direction, but we all hear him.

“What kind of precautions?” Lucas growls.

I put a hand on his arm and give a light squeeze. “Stop.”

I catch a funny glance shot our way by Deshi, and I wonder how weird it is for him, stepping into these established dynamics. Whether he worries about our stability or knows that if we argue or fight it doesn’t mean any of us are going to bail out.

Pax rolls his eyes and elbows Deshi in the ribs. “Lucas is a little over protective of Althea.”

“Althea can take care of herself,” Deshi adds helpfully.

“I
know
that, you guys. I do. I’m sorry if the thought of losing her makes me want to die. If I can make sure that doesn’t happen, that’s what I’m going to do. Pax, please start talking again so that I can stop babbling.” Lucas presses his lips together in a thin line, his face paler than normal.

I slip my hand into his and rub my thumb over his smooth skin. It can be exasperating, his instinct to try to block me from harm, but it also warms me. An echoing sentiment tugs at my heart, at my ability to breathe, when I imagine finding Lucas dead at the hands of the Others.

I never thought the kind of desperate love that fills me at being near him, at the whisper of a chance at a future together, would belong to me. Now that it does, there’s nothing I wouldn’t do to keep him safe.

“Deshi’s right about the Others tracking us. We need to do what we can to throw them off. We know they can communicate at great distances, and their whole mind-control thing. Super strength, damn near invincibility. Is there anything we don’t know, Desh? Anything that’s going to increase their odds of finding us out here?” Pax’s voice is all business now, clipped and serious.

“No. I mean, besides the fact that they’re smart.” He pauses. “They don’t have powers like the species they abduct—that’s why they take them. But don’t underestimate their minds.”

Deshi’s statements trigger my sudden concern. “I think we’ve all learned not to underestimate anyone’s mind, but are there any hybrids that you know of that can track us?”

He thinks for a moment, and while we wait, Leah and Brittany drop back until they’re walking alongside us. Deshi smiles at Brittany, who returns it hesitantly, before he speaks again. “The Sidhe, obviously. But we don’t know where they are.”

“Even if the Prime has them, they won’t help him catch us,” I snap.

“We don’t think.” Lucas gives me a look when I make a noise that sounds like protest. “We don’t. Griffin’s always been an unknown—his motivations, his appearances. And Greer…” He trails off, but we all know what he’s thinking. If Greer has the chance to save Nat, she will. Even if that means handing us over.

My heart rebels against that idea. After everything Greer and I have talked about, all the things we’ve shared, and the look on her face when she talks about the Others, part of me doesn’t believe she would trade my life for Nat’s.

But there’s no way to know for sure, so in the end I just shrug.

“There was another hybrid experiment that could fly. Gargols. But I think we killed the last one in the Underground Core. It was trapped in one of the cages when they fell.”

“
We
killed?” I can’t help myself. Deshi made the stairs fall, dashed all of the beings trapped helpless in cages to the ground.

His honey skin tinges a sickly green, and he blows hair out from in front of his eyes. “I did. I didn’t mean for the staircase to crash, it just… I lost control of my power.”

“Okay, so no real way to track us. Pax, what are you thinking?” I drop what happened last spring. Deshi’s one of us now. We’ve all lost control, we’ve all done things we didn’t mean to.

I feel badly about bringing it up. None of us will ever forget those moments, and we certainly don’t talk about them if we can help it. Now those events are part of what fuels our determination to win, to return this planet to its owners, whatever that means.

“You and I take three or four people and we split up for the rest of the day, trek east and west, make trails as big and obvious as we can manage.” Pax motions to the group in front of us. “There’s no way to cover this up. All we can do is confuse them, and even if all we do is make them split up, the group that catches up with us will be much smaller.”

I nod. “Okay. Yeah, that sounds good. I’ll do it.”

“I don’t know if it’s the best idea for the two of you to leave the group, Althea. If the four of you are split up, will you be able to protect us? Or yourselves?” Leah squints at me, reminding me she and Brittany have been listening.

“We have to do it. It’s our only chance to get to Dallas without them finding us,” I tell her. “Plus if they don’t find anyone in a day or two, they might give up. After all, they only saw the four of us at the cabin. There’s no way for them to know how many people were there. They might think they took care of everyone earlier today.”

“They might not come looking at all. Chasing us through the Wilds isn’t their style,” Deshi says. “They’re more likely to find a way to lure us to them.”

Leah doesn’t look convinced, but after exchanging a glance with Brittany, she nods. “Okay. It’s just… Brittany and I have been talking, and I don’t think I should stay with you guys.”

“What?” Pax stops walking, forcing the rest of us to grind to a halt.

The rest of the group notices and stops, too, turning to witness the confrontation that’s brewing in our little group of six.

Leah steps over to Pax, taking one of his big hands in her two dainty ones. “Hear me out. Last autumn in Danbury, when the Prime’s son looked like… him.” She jerks her head at Deshi. “We spent time together, he suspected something had messed with my veil. Now the Wardens at the Harvest Site know I’m your friend, that you were willing to fight for me. The Prime knows you had a bunch of unveiled kids. If they catch us, and I’m with you, they could put two and two together. What you can do with our veils.”

Her words hit me like a punch in the face. I can’t believe none of us thought of it at the Harvest Site, how stupid it might have been to bring Leah back into this mess. Pax and Lucas both look as stunned as I feel, but it doesn’t take long until reason slithers under my fright.

I’m about to reassure her when Pax takes the words right out of my mouth. “Maybe that’s true, but it doesn’t matter now. You’re with us. You don’t have anywhere else to go, and the Others are going to find out what we can do soon enough.” He raises a hand to her cheek and brushes his thumb across her lips, displaying a gentleness he rarely lets us see. “And I’m not letting you out of my sight again.”

Pax has been the tough guy, the rough-around-the-edges, full-of-playful-flirtation guy since I met him, and I love him for those things. But this is the Pax on the inside, the one daring to open up and care about someone again, even though he’s lost so much.

Leah’s eyes fill with tears as she nods, pressing her cheek into his palm.

We’re all staring, which is a little awkward, so I clear my throat. “They probably already suspect about the veils after finding a bunch of kids alone at a cabin in the Wilds with a dog, an injured Warden, and a couple of Sidhe, anyway.”

“Not to mention the fact that the four of us showed up,” Lucas adds.

Leah and Pax break eye contact, turning to face us with something new shining in their faces. It makes me want to smile and it also makes my heart ache, because every day we have more to lose.

“What’s going on?” Phil questions from the gathered group.

“You’re leaving us again?” Laura asks, her voice devoid of emotion.

It creeps me out a little bit, the way she sounds emotionless and uncaring the way everyone does in the Sanctioned Cities.

Before I can gather my wits and answer, Katie speaks up. “She’s not leaving anyone. None of them are. Just let them talk.”

Her voice wears a little thin in the middle, and she’s obviously struggling with walking on her leg even though Laura and Jordan help hold her up on both sides.

“Thanks, Katie. We’re going to go in different directions and leave some trails, try to throw off the Wardens if they try tracking us. We need some of you to come with us—people who are strong enough to move quickly.”